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Movie Review: Raising Victor Vargas

A funny and touching look at L.E.S. love.

by Gene "Quest" Demby | 2003.05.08

Big Business has co-opted the very idea of being an adolescent so thoroughly and made the teenage years seem so wild and carefree that American life is often just a slew of harried efforts bent on perpetuating one’s adolescence. High school sophomores on TV and in movies are almost always played by 22-year olds with perfect skin and portrayed with a ridiculous amount of self-awareness, so not even real teenagers seem to know what real teenagers look like. So, naturally, as a result you get a nation of annoyingly precocious fifth-graders who talk on cell phones, pathetic 35-year old men rocking velour sweatsuits emblazoned with gargantuan designer logos, Botox, SUVs, Matt Lauer’s buzzcut, and Janet Jackson’s increasing resemblance to Skeletor. It seems like no one wants to be a kid, and no one really wants to grow the fuck up. And why should they when no one really has to anymore?

In Raising Victor Vargas, Peter Sollett’s funny and touching new film, it’s obvious that someone looked at their high school yearbook and saw the (sometimes literally) ugly reality: that being a teenager is a messy, emotional minefield where folks make dumb mistakes and take silly chances not for the thrill—but because we simply didn’t know any better. Set in the brutal New York City summer Vargas’ eponymous protagonist is a 17-year old wannabe ladies’ man (Victor Rasuk) who at the movie’s opening is trying to sleep with Fat Donna, the piggish neighborhood ugly chick. After getting clowned by his friend Harold (Kevin Rivera) and his younger sister (who tells the whole neighborhood about Victor and Fat Donna), the pathologically lip-licking Victor approaches the popular “Juicy Judy” (Judy Marte) for bragging rights and to negate the whole Fat Donna affair. The man’s got an image to maintain, after all. Judy is suspicious of Victor’s motives, as every dude in the neighborhood is apparently trying to bag her. At home, Victor shares a cramped room in an apartment with his church boy younger brother Nino (Rasuk’s real life brother Sylvestre) and his sulking little sister. Both his younger brother and sister live and die with Victor’s acknowledgement of their respective existences, and their grandmother (played humorously by Altagracia Guzman) who is raising just wants them to be “a nice family.” When Grandma takes increasingly funny measures to rein in her grandkids—whom she feels are being corrupted by Victor—Victor is humbled, and finally grows up a little bit.

One of the great unspoken insights Vargas makes is about the generation gap between the kids’ and Grandma who obviously loves her kids (and they her), even if she doesn’t totally understand them. A dumber movie would have had made their relationship with Grandma more adversarial, but Vargas isn’t about teenager’s rebelling against authority as much as it is about teenage validation. Victor isn’t a bad kid or the stock urban teenage kid with gang affiliations or a drug habit we see in most movies with minority youths in lead roles. He, like most teenagers, just tries too hard. Judy is rightly put off by his pseudo-papi chulo swagger when he initially approaches her; he’s completely oblivious to how cheesy the shit he’s saying actually sounds to someone else. When he starts to have genuine feelings for Judy, it’s moving and funny how he isn’t licking his lips or tossing some corny lines her way any more. He’s not thinking about what he’s doing or saying; he’s just doing it.

Vargas’ verite camerawork and dialogue are handled so skillfully that parts of it could easily be mistaken for a documentary, and it’s an updating of Five Feet High and Rising, a student film Sollett shot while at NYU. The characters speak in the unforced patois of the inner city without sounding like they’re faking it, and the acting—by a cast of complete unknowns—is completely absorbing. Much like 2001’s Our Song, Vargas is an engrossing film which posits that being young comes with its own unique set of obstacles, most of them dealing with those frightening, unsure first steps toward whomever we’re gonna become. It doesn’t magnify or amplify those experiences, but it doesn’t McDonaldize or cheapen them either.

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